From the outside looking in, Disney Infinity appears to be a calculated bid by the House Of Mouse to seize a chunk of the audience won over by Skylanders.

Like Activision's mega-selling IP, Disney Infinity is a game where players plonk a plastic toy onto a hub-peripheral and a version of it appears on their screen. At first glance it looks like a game built around collectible toys and the 'nag-factor'; while its starter-pack comes bundled with three toys, a hub, the game and a couple of accoutrements, there is also a line of toys sold-separately toys in the retail pipeline, so parents, get ready with those wallets.

However, once you spend several hours in the company of Disney Infinity, you realise that it's a game of quite astounding ambition. What Avalanche has tried to do is build a video game that replicates the experience of playing with children's toys in real-life. All the more impressively, for the most part they've been incredibly successful.

Disney Infinity is divided between the two modes of Play Set and Toy Box. The former are essentially campaigns set in the different universes of the Disney Infinity toys. Plonk Sulley from Monsters, Inc. on the hub, select his adventure and off to Monsters Universty you go. Switch out for Captain Jack Sparrow and you'll find yourself hunting treasure in the Caribbean.

The Play Set adventures themselves aren't exactly compelling. For the most part, they involve the player's character picking up missions from NPCs, accomplishing tasks and unlocking collectibles for the Toy Box mode. The gameplay itself is fairly reminiscent of the Lego series of games, where players engage in the odd spot of platforming and bash practically everything in their environment for shiny swag – here it takes the form of fairy dust XP and coins to buy new toys.

There's a decent variety in the Play Sets and they introduce players to the mechanics of each character. Sulley, for example, can sneak up on characters and scare them and, in his quest to pay out the mean folk at Fear Tech (Monsters University's rival uni) he gains access to a gun that fires loo-roll early on.

Mr Incredible can smash his fists into the ground to send foes flying and his adventure involves rounding up villains and tossing them in to his super prison.

Captain Jack Sparrow is on a quest to stop Davy Jones bagging some buried treasure and his quest contains some rather fun naval battles.

It should be pointed out that Play Sets only allow characters from the same universe to play together. This means that if you want to play co-op with a mate, say, in Mr Incredible's campaign, you need to buy a figurine from that movie.

Since figurines are £15 a pop, this seems a bit cheeky, and may put some players off the Play Set mode altogether. To be honest, the main reason to play the Play Sets – apart from familiarising oneself with the game mechanics – is to unlock stuff for the Toy Box. You can also play co-op in Toy Box with any characters you like and it's really here, in this marvellous creative tool, that players will truly see what Disney Infinity is capable of.

In essence, Toy Box is a 3D game level designer, but to describe it as such feels like I'm woefully underselling the unbridled fun you can have with it. Think of it as a cross between Minecraft, Lego and LittleBigPlanet and you're starting to get the idea.

In Toy Box there's a decent selection of component parts and pre-built sets, and any item you find in the Play Sets is automatically available. The pieces themselves are component parts – roads, ramps, houses, castles – but even though you can't build original items from scratch there's still a lot of room for creativity here.

It's like virtual play-dough; you can lose several hours crafting an intricate race track filled with pressure pads that miniaturise and then supersize cars as they roll over them. You can lose several more hours positioning cannons around the same racetrack that will fire endless streams of beach balls at the race participants. You can sink an entire afternoon chasing your friend around the amusement park you both built, picking each other up and punting each other into space. The sense of fun in this mode is so childlike it seems to bend time.

There are, unfortunately, a couple of stumbling blocks. The platforming, for example, lacks agency and sometimes the characters the player is controlling feel like they're floating on a cushion of air. There's the odd visual glitch here and there and frame rate can slow to a crawl.

The fact that players will need to buy an extra figurine before a mate or a family member can join them in a Play Set game feels unnecessarily miserly as does the fact that some content and missions in the Play Sets require more characters to access them. But the biggest fault here is that the game locks away a lot of the content for Toy Box needlessly, demanding players level up before giving them the chance to 'spin' for new items in the Toy Box vault.

But, in spite of these concerns, Disney Infinity is a bright, shining gem of a game.

It comes as close as any video game can to recreating that starry-eyed sense of fun that comes from simply playing with toys and creating worlds with one's imagination. There's probably a closing comment to be made here about children of all ages, but I'm too dignified to make it. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to sail my pirate ship…